just married

Last night I had occasion to take a taxi and struck the cab driver from hell. Well, hell is an understatement: he was from purgatory. Drove with his hands in the air as he banged on to me about greenies and their so-called eco crisis, a plot to make money.

I couldn’t help it, I laughed in his face. “Gee, sorry. I think if I was out for a quick buck I’d be in oil wells, not solar panels.” “And what about palm oil?” he ranted. “All it’s doing is making money for the Indonesians.”

You can always tell, when someone lumps a group of people together and prefixes with “the”, there is hatred involved. Or at the very least, disrespect. “Palm oil’s not green,” I said. We charged down the streets. I changed the subject three times. “Isn’t it a wonderful night?” (It was.) “Have you been working long this evening?”

All ruses led back to Rome, and the Fall. He was breathing heavily with rage. Meantime an iridescent something had appeared in the road in front of us, it seemed to be some kind of fine streamer whickering in the air – “Did they just get married, you think?” I asked, pointing.

The car on the right had the same gleaming trail. “I think maybe they both just drove through an old cassette tape,” said the driver, and he was right. Long loops of glorious analog spurled through the air, dancing with light and with movement, a magic. He started talking about fisheries, how ridiculous it is to have quotas: because who is going to explain to the fish that they must not swim into the net? I wasn’t listening, I was watching the wind. The scarf that bore Isadora Duncan to heaven had unfurled itself from the car in front and whipped round the passenger-side mirror, inches from my hand. I unwound the window to let the night in. So beautiful, so triste. Because no matter how we block each other out – by hating greenies, by not listening to taxi drivers – sooner or later life slings its tendrils like lassos around our hearts and we have to wind the window down and let the night in.